‘A Friend of the Community’: How Robert Woodruff Helped Bring the CDC to Atlanta

Robert Woodruff, president of The Coca-Cola Company from 1923 to 1954, at Ichauway Plantation.

(Photo Credit: )

The Ebola outbreak
has kept Atlanta in the headlines – or datelines, to be exact – these last few
months thanks to the critical work of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The federal government agency known as the CDC is on the front lines of the global fight against
the deadly disease and other public health concerns.

The lineage of the CDC and its current home near
Emory University can be traced to another infectious disease, malaria,
which crippled the Southeast in the early 20th Century, and to
former Coca-Cola President Robert Woodruff.

Woodruff owned
Ichauway Plantation, a hunting preserve and working farm in Baker County, Ga., about
200 miles south of Atlanta. During a 1929 visit there, he met one of his employees who, a few
minutes after shaking Woodruff’s hand, suffered a seizure and passed out. The
man – and many of his fellow tenant farmers – had malaria.

"Mr. Woodruff went out and bought a barrel of quinine to distribute not just to Ichauway residents, but to everyone in Baker County," said Randy Gue, curator of modern political and historical collections at Emory University's Robert W. Woodruff Library.

For the next few years, Woodruff continued to
anonymously purchase and give away the antimalarial drug to anyone in the area
who would agree to follow doctor’s orders. Eventually, he decided to personally
fund Baker County’s first public health department in the town of Newton. The
benefactor was listed simply as a “friend of the community.”

“The state of Georgia had been hammered by
the Great Depression, and didn’t have money to pay for any county services,”
Gue explains. “And Baker County was poor in ways we cannot imagine…no railroad, no
highway and no industry.”

By the late 1930s, Woodruff had created the
Woodruff Malaria Fund at Emory and asked the university’s department of
pathology to study the disease’s foothold in an effort to eradicate malaria in
Baker County, where more than 40 percent of the population was infected at the
time. In addition to collecting blood samples from residents, researchers
measured stream flow rates and groundwater hydrology, and analyzed mosquito
populations (which transmit the disease).

“It was the first truly comprehensive field study
of malaria,” Gue said. “Before then, the disease had only been studied in the
lab.”

The team’s findings quickly caught the
attention of the Georgia Department of Public Health and the U.S. Public Health
Service. “The data they were getting was persuasive,” Gue adds. “That was the
point in time when the relationships that would lead to the location of the CDC
in Atlanta began.”

When the U.S. entered World War II, the
government did not want soldiers to contract malaria before heading off to
battle – or to bring the disease back home when they returned. So, in 1942 the U.S. Public Health
Service set up a program
called the Malaria Control in War Areas to prevent the spread of malaria. And since many military training
bases were in the South, Atlanta was chosen as its headquarters.

In 1946, with
peace restored, the agency changed its name to the Communicable Disease Center
and first adopted the CDC acronym. The center had expanded its focus to
other communicable diseases and outgrown its space, but government funding
stalled following the war.

That’s when Woodruff re-entered the picture, striking a
deal with Emory in which the university would sell the CDC 15 acres of land on
Clifton Road for the grand sum of $10. CDC employees pitched
in to make the purchase.

As was often the case with Woodruff’s
philanthropic efforts, the gift was anonymous.

“Mr. Woodruff worked behind the scenes,” Gue
said. “There was rarely a paper trail or a smoking gun behind his good deeds.”